PCIE to SATA or NVME?

[WoodenBleachers]

I’ve been looking at building myself a small, budget server, and ended up settling for a  prebuilt on eBay.  The device has two pcie gen 3 slots, one x16 and one x4.  My question is: in order to pack this thing full of drives, should I use a x4 to 6 SATA expansion card or get something for NVME on the 4 lanes and then get a PLX NVME card for 4 more NVME in the future?  I’ll be running trueNAS if that’s of importance.

Thanks for all the help!

[Efficient_Good_5784]

If this is for Truenas, I would advise you skip out on SATA port multipliers as they can cause issues with your data.

Instead, I would advise you to look at HBAs that connect through the PCIe slots on your motherboard.
Just make sure to flash them to IT mode if they're not already by the seller so that they can properly be used by Truenas.
The important part for Truenas is that the drives are passed to Truenas so that it can see the drive's by their serial number.
Truenas uses the serial number of the drives to ID the drives.

As an example, here's a listing of an LSI 9207-8i HBA card.
It's a PCIe 3.0 x8 card that can connect up to 8 SATA drives at once. Just make sure to buy the appropriate breakout cables for it.
And even though it's an x8 card, it will work with less lanes. If you connect it to your 3.0 x4 slot, it will still have access to roughly 4GB/s bandwidth between it and the computer.
Also, if your case can't fit the full-size card, look up a low-profile bracket for it in case you need that.

And a final note if you do go with an HBA. Make sure to slap on a fan over its heatsink.
HBAs get hot and the heat can cause data issues.
They're designed for enterprise-grade enclosures with a lot of airflow. That's why they have a relatively small heatsink for how hot they get.
A small 40mm PC fan strapped onto the heatsink usually is enough to keep the HBA's temperature within safe operating temps.

[WoodenBleachers]

Update: I decided to go with the HBA and I am quite pleased. With some hunting I found one for about $20. The proper cables were about $10 and my PSU already had the SATA power cables. Thanks for the help @Efficient_Good_5784.